Day 7

Thursday, Oct. 3rd

We woke to a cloudy, windy day and got a very late start.   Instead of traveling east on Interstate 80 we took 30, a two lane highway with very little traffic.  It goes through small towns every few miles and has many pull offs with historic markers.  I could still use Franzwa’s Map book to follow our proximity to the trail as we traveled.  The trail, Highway 30 and the Interstate all pretty much parallel each other across this part of Nebraska.   The NPS Guide for Nebraska mentioned the 1864 Indian Wars that occurred along the trail and that the Dawson County Historical Museum  in Lexington had more information about the wars.  This was exciting because my family traveled across the trail in 1864 and their wagon train was attacked. We stopped at the museum.

Dawson County Historical Museum

My grandmother told me about her father’s trip across the Oregon Trail riding the big white horse as a young boy but she never mentioned their train was attacked by Indians.  I discovered this at the LDS Family History Library in Salt Lake City several years ago. 

The paragraph below is about William Summers, a neighbor of my family in Iowa.

In the spring of 1864 he assisted in organizing a party for a trip to California.  His father, brothers John and George, and sister Mary A. were of the party.  They had an outfit, a pair of horses, two cows, and several loose horses.  On reaching Omaha the elder Summers went to visit a neighbor, Thomas Johnson, who was with a large party camped not far off.  He stopped with them all night, and the next morning his own train started without him, and he did not find it again until they all arrived at Boise City, Idaho.  The Summers party escaped collision with the Indians, while the larger train with which his father was then traveling, was attacked, their stock stampeded, and one man killed.
From Portrait and Biographical Album of Henry Co., Iowa

Thomas Johnson, mentioned above, is my great-great-grandfather.  I wanted to find out more about the 1864 Indian Wars along the Oregon Trail. 

Thomas Johnson

The Southern Cheyenne, the Arapahoes and the Sioux gathered in the summer of 1864 and planned and executed an attack on the trail between Julesburg, on the South Platte in the west and Kiowa Station on the Little Blue River in the east.  Attacks had become more common than usual during the summer and  on August 7^th they attacked stage coaches, emigrant trains, freight wagon trains, stations and ranches all along the route.  At Plum Creek, in Dawson County, Nebraska,  men were killed and women and children taken as captives. 

The museum at Lexington has a research room and a small museum.  While Glen and I walked around the museum a very nice docent looked up information about the 1864 Indian Wars for me.  I had an article copied and bought a book.   I didn’t find any reference to my family and the Indian Wars specifically but the attack on their train was certainly related.  

The Johnson Boys

The Johnson family, one of the first families to settle in Iowa after the Black Hawk War, had a prosperous farm in New London, Iowa.  In 1864 it was sold and they left for Walla Walla. There was no family story that I know of about why this occurred.  I have recently found all the older boy's names on an 1864 Civil War draft list online.  They all returned to Iowa in 1866, after the war.  My conclusion is that they were avoiding the draft.  

We stopped at Minden, Nebraska planning to spend the next day at several museums that turned out to be very different.